In 2010, I left my job as a staff photographer for a Spanish paper. I'd been at the same place for six years and felt like a robot. I was shooting the same stories over and over again, and my pictures would always be used in the same way. After a while in news, you realise everything – apart from breaking stories – is cyclical. I wasn't experimenting and I wasn't enjoying myself.

So I took a year's sabbatical and said to myself: "Instead of complaining, why don't you try to prove them wrong? Why don't you do a story that you think is important and tell it in your own way? If it doesn't work, then stop complaining."

I started researching true stories people don't believe and fake stories they do. If you play around with reality, it gives a completely different dimension to the idea of photography as a document. Normally, photography is understood as being true: we assume nothing is manipulated, especially if it's in a newspaper.

I found a location on the outskirts of Madrid. I needed a place people could associate with Africa. The rubbish dump was visually attractive and helped me play with the misconception that Africa is full of rubbish dumps. I managed to find a model with afro hair – it didn't matter that he was actually Brazilian. And I was very lucky with the costume: a friend was working on a Spanish movie called The Cosmonaut and had a real Russian spacesuit I could borrow.

There is very little documentation from this moment in Zambia's history, so I had to figure out my own way to tell the story. I used family photo albums from the 1960s as a visual reference. The pictures are all square and de-saturated, with a pink tone. Some of the pictures that featured in the series, called The Afronauts, were actually old ones taken on trips to the US and Italy. That's the great thing about staging: you can play with images and even recycle old ones. The point I wanted to make was not that the project failed because it was the work of a poor African country, but that Nkoloso tried and believed it was possible. It would never happen in Europe: people would say there was no point in even trying. But it happened in Africa because there is a different – and beautiful – attitude there.